University of Virginia Library

This is the sixth in a series of essays I have written covering the second half of the twentieth century; it, like the others, is limited to general theoretical writings in English and does not attempt to deal with textual studies of particular authors or individual editions. The first three essays, published in Studies in Bibliography [SB] in 1975, 1981, and 1986, were brought out in book form in 1987 as Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-1985. The fourth and fifth appeared in SB as follows: "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," SB, 44 (1991), 83-143; and "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism," SB, 49 (1996), 1-60. (A portion of the last, in slightly revised form, was published as "Reflections on Scholarly Editing" in Raritan, 16.2 [Fall 1996], 52-64.)

W. Speed Hill has discussed seven of the first eight volumes in the series in "Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism: Lamb and Wolf?", Review, 19 (1997), 37-64.

It must also be said that Trevor Howard-Hill, as editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, has done an excellent job with reviews (especially, one is tempted to say, when he writes them himself); but he cannot concentrate on textual matters, since the scope of his journal is much broader. Lengthy reviews of documentary editions also regularly appear in Documentary Editing.

Several are entirely devoted to individual authors and thus are outside the scope of the present essay. Many of the 1995-2000 volumes are recorded in notes 5-12 below, and some of them are taken up again at various later points in the essay. In the previous (1996) essay in this series (see note 1 above), I commented on the anthology phenomenon on pp. 1819 and discussed some of the volumes from the early 1990s on pp. 19-33.

Contemporary German Editorial Theory, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (1995); Editing D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author, ed. Charles L. Ross and Dennis Jackson (1995); The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (1996); The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (1997); A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in "The Cantos," ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (1997); and The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (1998).

Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts, ed. Germaine Warkentin (1995); Editing Early and Historical Atlases, ed. Joan Winearls (1995); Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus, ed. Erika Rummel (1996); Music Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts, ed. Maria Rika Maniates (1997); Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (1998); and Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Texts, ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren D. Rice (1999).

Problems of Editing, ed. Christa Jansohn (Beihefte zu Editio 14, 1999).

New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996, ed. W. Speed Hill (1998); Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed. Philip Cohen (1997); The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts, ed. Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey (1998); Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham (1995); and The Margins of the Text, ed. Greetham (1997). (George Bornstein, however, holds the record, having edited two anthologies before 1995 and two in the 1995-2000 period [see note 5 above].)

Editing Texts, Texte edieren, ed. Glenn W. Most (1998); New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (1998); Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, ed. Seth Leter (1996; also published as a separate number of Huntington Library Quarterly, 58.1); A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat (1998); Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (1998); Studies in Stemmatology, ed. Pieter van Reenen and Margot van Mulken, with Janet Dyk (1996); The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (1996); Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (1997).

Such as Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk (1996); Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America, ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (1996); Editing the Text, ed. Marysa Demoor, Geert Lernout, and Sylvia van Peteghem (1998); Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (1998); Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry (2000); and Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists, ed. Alexander Pettit (2000).

"Textual Scholarship and American Literature," ed. Philip Cohen, Resources for American Literary Study, 20.2 (1994 [but published later]), 133-263, a collection incorporated in Cohen's 1997 anthology (see note 8 above); "Editing Novels and Novelists, Now," ed. Alexander Pettit, Studies in the Novel, 27.3 (Fall 1995), 251-450, four essays from which were included (some with revisions) in his 2000 anthology mentioned in the preceding note; [special issue on genetic criticism], ed. Michael Riffaterre and Antoine Compagnon, Romanic Review, 86.3 (May 1995), 391-598; "Textual Shakespeare," ed. Graham Holderness and Andrew Murphy, Critical Survey, 7.3 (1995), 239-379; "Editing the Literary Imagination," ed. Tom Quirk, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 29.2 (Fall 1996), 1-107; "Genetic Criticism," ed. Claire Bustarret, Word & Image, 13.2 (April-June 1997), 103-222; "The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles," ed. Andrew Gurr et al., Yearbook of English Studies, 29 (1999), 1-261; and "Making Texts for the Next Century," ed. Peter M. W. Robinson and Hans W. Gabler, Literary & Linguistic Computing, 15.1 (2000), 1-120.

"A Force in His Field: Fredson Bowers's Wider Influence," ed. Jo Ann Boydston et al., Text, 8 (1995), 25-100; "Teaching Textual Criticism," ed. D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill, Text, 9 (1996), 135-174; "Forum: Editing Early Modern Texts," ed. Susan Zimmerman, Shakespeare Studies, 24 (1996), 19-78; and "Medieval Studies at the Millennium," Studies in Medievalism, 9 (1997; "Medievalism and the Academy, I," ed. Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger, 1999), 228-261 (on electronic editions). (On the subject of teaching, see also J. Paul Hunter, "Editing for the Classroom: Texts in Contexts," Studies in the Novel, 27 [1995], 284-294; C. W. Griffin, "Textual Studies and Teaching Shakespeare," in Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ronald E. Salomone [1997], pp. 104-111; and Bodo Plachta, "Teaching Editing—Learning Editing," and Rex Gibson, "Editing Shakespeare for School Students," both in the 1999 Problems of Editing [see note 7 above], pp. 18-32, 180-199.)

William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott's An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, originally published in 1985, came out in a third edition in 1999. (An essay-length introduction also appeared during this time: W. R. Owens's "Editing Literary Texts," in A Handbook to Literary Research, ed. Simon Eliot and W. R. Owens [1998], pp. 63-81, which uses most of its brief space for two extended examples.)

Of the four checklists, one is an expansion of a previously published work: T. H. Howard-Hill's marvelously thorough and admirably indexed Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography (2000), an updated revision of his 1971 volume (with coverage extended to 1995). (Among his other publications during this period was the 198089 volume [1999] of his Index to British Literary Bibliography.) A related checklist is Jeremy Lopez's "An Annotated Bibliography of Textual Scholarship in [non-Shakespearean] Elizabethan Drama, 1973-1998," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 29 (2000), 17-76. The other two works have a broader scope, and the more comprehensive of the two is my Introduction to Scholarly Editing: Seminar Syllabus (1998), which attempts to provide basic reading lists for beginners as well as an extensive record of the literature of the field, including analytical bibliography. (I should note that a revised edition, expanded to 257 pages, was published in 2002; its listing of books and articles from the 1995-2000 period includes more items than are mentioned in the present essay.) The other checklist is clearly the least valuable of the four: William Baker and Kenneth Womack's Twentieth-Century Bibliography and Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (2000), containing 769 entries divided into six sections, in each of which the ploddingly annotated items are arranged alphabetically by author. It is hard to know who will find this volume helpful: the 225 entries under "Textual Criticism"—especially arranged and annotated as they are—will not readily guide a beginner into the field, and an advanced scholar will not wish to use such a restricted list to search for relevant scholarship.

Michael Hunter, "How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice," The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 277-310; Michael E. Stevens and Steven B. Burg, Editing Historical Documents: A Handbook of Practice (1997); Mary-Jo Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing (originally published in 1987 and revised in 1998); and David L. Vander Meulen and G. Thomas Tanselle, "A System of Manuscript Transcription," SB, 52 (1999), 201-212. The last of these criticizes the other three for not adequately distinguishing transcription from emendation, since all three allow the task of transcription to include the alteration of certain features of the manuscript texts. (The Vander Meulen-Tanselle piece also presents a new form of inclusive notation that avoids symbols and permits readers easily to recognize the final reading at each point of revision.) I should perhaps call attention to another guide to transcription, even though it appeared after 2000: P. D. A. Harvey's Editing Historical Records (2001), which—despite being sensible in general and recognizing the dangers of normalization—does not entirely avoid the problem of those three earlier works (allowing, for example, categories of silent alterations). (Luciana Duranti's Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science [1998] deals exclusively with the archival management and authentication of documents and does not take up so-called diplomatic transcription.)

I have written about the events surrounding this publication in "The Librarians' Double-Cross," Raritan, 21.4 (Spring 2002), 245-263, which also reviews Baker's important related book, Double Fold: Librarians and the Assault on Paper (2001). Some of the earlier pieces in my campaign to save originals are collected in my Literature and Artifacts (1998); those from the period under review here are "The Future of Primary Records," pp. 96-123, and "Statement on the Significance of Primary Records [for the Modern Language Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of the Print Record]," pp. 335-337.

There were other, if less public, instances of attention to the history of editing, such as Tim William Machan, "Speght's Works and the Invention of Chaucer," Text, 8 (1995), 145-170; Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & EighteenthCentury Literary Theory (1995); Charlotte Brewer, Editing "Piers Plowman": The Evolution of the Text (1996); Alain Corbellari, "Joseph Bédier, Philologist and Writer," in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (1996), pp. 269-285; Mary B. Speer, "Exhuming the First Guide to Editing Old French Texts: Prompsault's Discours sur les publications littéraires du moyen-âge and the Controversy of 1835," Text, 10 (1997), 181-201; Marcel De Smedt, "W. Bang Kaup, W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow and the Edition of English Dramatic Works (1902-1914)," SB, 50 (1997), 213-223; Carol Percy, "Earlier Editorial Practice vs. Later Linguistic Precept: Some Eighteenth-Century Illustrations," English Language Notes, 34.3 (1997), 23-39; Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (1997); The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia: The First Fifty Years, ed. David L. Vander Meulen (1998); Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (1998); Michael E. Stevens, " `The Most Important Scholarly Work': Reflections on Twenty Years of Change in Historical Editing," Documentary Editing, 20 (1998), 81-84, 97; David George, "Eighteenth-Century Editors, Critics, and Performers of Coriolanus," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 10 (1999), 63-71; David L. Vander Meulen, "The Editorial Principles of Martinus Scriblerus," in The Culture of the Book: Essays from Two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop, ed. David Garrioch, Harold Love, Brian McMullin, Ian Morrison, and Meredith Sherlock (1999), pp. 173-181; Steven Escar Smith, " `The Eternal Verified': Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation," SB, 53 (2000), 129-161; and Carlo M. Bajetta's edition of McKerrow's 1928 Sandars Lectures in SB, 53 (2000), 1-65. Also during this period Joseph Rosenblum edited Sir Walter Wilson Greg: A Collection of His Writings (1998).

Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine, ed. Trevor H. Levere (1982); Editing Modern Economists, ed. D. E. Moggridge (1988); Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts (see note 6 above); Music Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times (see note 6 above). The partially verbal genre of atlases has also been treated in Editing Early and Historical Atlases (see note 6 above). (On atlases, see also Mary Sponberg Pedley, "Atlas Editing in Enlightenment France," Scholarly Publishing, 27 [1995-96], 100-117.)

His 1997 essay "Oral Tradition into Textuality," in Texts and Textuality (see note 8 above), pp. 1-24, is both a concise survey of scholarly trends and also a manifesto for a way of reading that recognizes performance clues in the tangible text, allowing the text to "teach us to read it" (p. 15). (As the title of the essay suggests, he uses "text" only to refer to tangible texts. In my view, it would be preferable to regard the elements of the oral performance as constituting a text also; editors interested in the oral work could then be described as attempting to reconstruct the text of a performance from the text of a document. But my point is not a crucial one, since it only involves a matter of definition, and Foley's discussion is not affected adversely by his use of a different definition.) The essay draws on his fuller argument in The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995); see chapter 3, "The Rhetorical Persistence of Traditional Forms," pp. 60-98, where he speaks of the physical text as a "libretto for the reader's performance" (p. 97), once one learns that "traditional forms and strategies persist in texts as rhetorically active signals" (p. 95). Foley also wrote the chapter on "Folk Literature," a historical account of editing in the field, for the 1995 anthology Scholarly Editing (see note 8 above), pp. 600-626. For other recent instances of linking oral and written traditions, see Margaret Clunies Ross, "Editing the Oral Text: Medieval and Modern Transformations," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 173192, and the 1999 Toronto volume, Talking on the Page (see note 6 above).

See my 1991 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 122-128. In Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), W. B. Worthen has offered a thorough discussion of "basic questions about the page, the stage, and the acting of authority" (p. 4), drawing heavily on recent editorial theory ("Authority and Performance," pp. 1-43).

Of course, stage productions that have been filmed fall into the same category as cinematic works (as far as this one point is concerned); but the number of such films is tiny in comparison to all the dramatic performances that could not have been, or were not, filmed. (And of course such a film may not show every nonverbal detail that would have been visible to a theater audience, whereas in cinematic works the nonverbal elements that are visible in a given version are by definition the only ones that exist in that particular version of the work.)

"The Auteur-Author Paradox: How Critics of the Cinema and the Novel Talk about Flawed or Even `Mutilated' Texts," Studies in the Novel (see note 11 above), 27 (1995), 413426.

"Knowing the Score: Italian Opera as Work and Play," Text, 8 (1995), 1-24. The same volume of Text also contains Ellen J. Burns, "Opera as Heard: A Libretto Edition for Phenomenological Study," pp. 185-216. Other similar signs are Catherine Coppola, "The Working Relationship between Elliot Carter and Bernard Greenhouse: Implications Regarding Issues of Text and Performance," Text, 9 (1996), 315-325 (which cites as an analogy Philip Gaskell's discussion of Tom Stoppard in From Writer to Reader [1978]); and Robyn Holmes, "Australian Music Editing and Authenticity: `Would the Real Mrs Monk please stand up?'," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 209-226. The issues raised by recordings and player-piano rolls have also been discussed in recent years: Jeff Brownrigg, "The Art of Audio-Editing: Re-Presenting Early Australian Vocal Recordings," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 193-208; Kenneth Womack, "Editing the Beatles: Addressing the Roles of Authority and Editorial Theory in the Creation of Popular Music's Most Valuable Canon," Text, 11 (1998), 189-205; and Andrew Durkin, "The Self-Playing Piano as a Site for Textual Criticism," Text, 12 (1999), 167-188.

"The Definition of `Text,' " Text [Uppsala], 5.2 (1998), 50-69 (quotation from pp. 57 and 67). To him, this definition entails distinguishing texts of documents from texts in documents. The latter is the text that is part of a physical object; the former is the same "sequence" (of words and punctuation) wherever it appears (this is what to him is a "real text" because if "text" means "sequence," and sequence is an abstract concept, a physical text cannot "belong to the text concept proper" [p. 67].) I do not find this elaboration necessary, for I see nothing illogical in speaking of (for example) the identity of two texts in two documents. Sequence is simply the abstract concept used to analyze a combination of elements, and it applies equally to tangible and intangible expressions of that combination.

The editors of Text saw fit, for example, to publish Janis C. Bell's "The Critical Reception of Raphael's Coloring in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Text, 9 (1996), 199-215. The Society had been founded in 1979 as "an organization devoted to the interdisciplinary discussion of textual theory and practice" (as explained in the first volume of Text [1984 for 1981]). The "plastic arts" are also included in Pierre-Marc de Biasi's survey of the extension of genetic criticism to nonliterary and nonverbal works; see "Horizons for Genetic Studies," Word & Image (see note 11 above), 13 (1997), 124-134 (commented on very briefly in the treatment of critique génétique in part II below).

Strangely enough, he considers modernizing to be a part of the process of transcription (as on p. 2). (Cf. note 15 above.)

Unfortunately, however, Grier on occasion undercuts this welcome point, as when he allows himself to say, "Before anything can be done to a piece, performance, analysis, historical studies, its text must be made known to those who would pursue these undertakings. And the presentation of the text is the editor's job" (p. 37). This sounds surprisingly like the old notion of editors providing texts for critics to analyze—a notion not entirely overturned by Grier's next sentence, which calls an edition "not so much a tool, leading to higher ends, as an active, critical participant in those ends." For the split has already been asserted, rather than an emphasis on the editorial element in every reader's response and thus on the editor's task as essentially the same as that of all other readers.

Grier's accounts of the "semiotic nature of music notation" (as on pp. 25-27), which are apparently meant to distinguish music scores from verbal texts on paper, do not in fact do so: are not the meanings of letterforms and punctuation, like those of music notation, dependent on "context and convention" (p. 67)?

To name one more: Grier says that Greg's copy-text approach "fails as a theory for one simple reason: the difficulty in creating an unequivocal definition of substantive and accidental" (p. 107). This remark reflects a failure not only to understand the firm distinction Greg actually made but also to comprehend that the distinction is ultimately not central to the theory. Furthermore, to add that "the physical presentation . . . of the work and text can carry significant meaning" does not in any way contradict Greg's theory.

He is also a visual artist himself, and anyone who saw his installation "White Noise" at the Whitney Museum in August 2001 knows how elegant and moving his work can be.

The lucidity of Grigely's language stands out sharply in contrast to the prose of Nicole Fugman, who also examines art works in her attempt "to reconceptualize textual criticism and situate it in the ensemble of critique which encompasses philology, historiography, and aesthetics"; see "Contemporary Editorial Theory and the Transvaluation of Postmodern Critique," Text, 10 (1997), 15-29 (quotation from p. 19).

Even a label on the reverse, once one knows about it, plays its role: the reverse "is a still life because this is the location where the transience of the artwork is documented, where traces are accumulated of its passage through particular places at particular times" (p. 177). In an impressively wide-ranging book about the role of memory in culture (Cultural Selection, 1996), Gary Taylor offers similar observations on a painting, Velázquez's Las Meninas, noting that its position in the "edited collection" of the Prado affects its meaning and that works are inevitably subject to "transformations" (such as the photograph of Las Meninas in his book) as they become "dispersed among many members of a society." The generally unremembered or "invisible" persons who perform these transformations (including "reproducers, restorers, curators") may all be called "editors," and "the editorial process fundamentally affects everything we remember about the achievements of the past" (pp. 122-125, in the chapter entitled "Invisible Man," pp. 121-142). (He had made some of the same points in an earlier essay, "What Is an Author [Not]?", Critical Survey [see note 11 above], 7 [1995], 241-254.) Paul Eggert has also discussed the role of the viewer and restorer in the construction of works of visual art, in the third section of his "Where Are We Now with Authorship and the Work?", Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 88-102.

The writers in Text were Hans Walter Gabler, Louis Hay, Jean-Louis Lebrave, and Klaus Hurlebusch; those in SB were Hay, Gerhard Neumann, Hurlebusch, and Siegfried Scheibe. I have discussed these pieces in the 1991 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 112-118, and in the 1975 article cited there in note 37. (See also the 1996 essay in the series, note 85.)

"Towards a New Manuscriptology: Génésis, Volumes 1-6," Text, 10 (1997), 362-368. Falconer notes the emphasis on "the inner dynamics of writing, the poetics of composition rather than the context and circumstances in which that composition occurred" (which causes him to say that history is "singularly absent from these pages"); and he praises the journal's "openness to discussions of non-literary art forms" (p. 367).

The Greetham volume deals with traditions in German (by Bodo Plachta), Italian (Paolo Cherchi), Russian (Edward Kasinec and Robert Whittaker), Old and early modern French (Mary B. Speer, Edmund Campion), and medieval Spanish (Alberto Blecua and Germán Orduna), as well as Greek (Bruce M. Metzger, Mervin R. Dilts), Latin (R. J. Tarrant), Hebrew (Francis I. Andersen), Arabic (M. G. Carter), and Sanskrit (Ludo Rocher). (See also Edwin Rabbie, "Editing Neo-Latin Texts," Editio, 10 [1996], 25-48.) The Bowers assemblage (see note 12 above) includes comments on work in Italy (Conor Fahy), France (Wallace Kirsop), Spain (David R. Whitesell), and Japan (Hiroshi Yamashita). (For those who read German and French, current checklists of scholarship are published in Editio and Génésis; and see Jacques Neefs, "A Select Bibliography of Genetic Criticism," Yale French Studies, 89 [1996], 265-267.

An anthology largely on classical literature, Glenn W. Most's Editing Texts, Texte edieren (1998), has the laudable aim of helping to bridge the editorial "theory gap" between classicists and scholars of the modern literatures. As Most says, textual theory has been much more discussed in recent years by the latter group than by the former, which has "neglected or downplayed, for the most part, the thorny theoretical questions raised by the practice of textual editing" (p. viii). The contributions, however, will do more to give the modernliterature editors some examples of the work of classicists than it will to acquaint classicists with recent thinking among modern-literature editors. An effort with a somewhat similar aim in the biblical field is Ferdinand E. Deist's brief piece on "Texts, Textuality, and Textual Criticism," Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 21.2 (1995), 59-67; he wishes to acquaint biblical scholars with the ways in which textual criticism is affected by such movements as poststructuralism and deconstruction (which have "much in common with rabbinistic interpretations" [p. 66]), as well as to show the assumptions that underlie traditional textual criticism (but unfortunately he does not point out what is wrong with thinking of it as "preparatory text restoration" [p. 60]).

Eclecticism need not be associated only with an interest in authorial intention, for there are other goals that emendation can support. But that is a separate point.

I do not understand how Zeller got the idea that Anglo-American editors do not record documentary variants, including those in manuscripts. He even claims, incredibly, that the bias of Anglo-American editors has prevented them "from devoting the same attention to manuscript versions as . . . to the printed ones" (p. 97). Zeller's two essays commented on here are "Record and Interpretation: Analysis and Documentation as Goal and Method of Editing," pp. 17-58; and "Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American Textual Criticism," pp. 95-123.

"In Between the `Royal Way' of Philology and `Occult Science': Some Remarks about German Discussion on Text Constitution in the Last Ten Years," trans. Dieter Neiteler, Text, 12 (1999), 31-47.

It is not clear what he means (especially in this context) when he says, "To my mind, . . . the edited text, and not the text reproduced in facsimile, must remain `the main part of an edition', because it is the edited text alone that enables the response of the reader" (p. 47).

"A Resistence to Contemporary German Editorial Theory and Practice," Editio, 12 (1998), 138-150.

Another way in which the essay could have been improved is that the distinction between "version" and "document" could have been made explicit. Near the beginning, Shillingsburg says that many of the essays in the German anthology state that reports of the historical record "take precedence over any attempts to meld versions into an eclectic text" (p. 141)—as if that is indeed how eclectic texts are constructed.

Among the French contributions are essays by Graham Falconer, Almuth Grésillon, Louis Hay, Jean-Louis Lebrave, and Jacques Neefs, names that will be familiar to those who have read in this area.

"Editing Manuscripts: Towards a Typology of Recent French Genetic Editions, 1980-1995," trans. Helène Erlichson, Text, 12 (1999), 1-30. Cf. his "What Is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation," Yale French Studies, 89 (1996), 26-58.

The use of "text" to refer primarily to the final text of a work (as when a vertical edition "reaches the textual stage itself" [p. 26]) is a further drawback. The fact that every stage has a text is glimpsed only sporadically here, as in the phrase "the textual text" (p. 20). (Surely the problem is not entirely attributable to the translator.)

"Understanding the Author's Compositional Method: Prolegomenon to a Hermeneutics of Genetic Writing," trans. Uta Nitschke-Stumpf and Hans Walter Gabler, Text, 13 (2000), 55-101 (quotation from p. 64). Another unuseful attempt to cross geographical boundaries is the superficial and uncritical survey of national traditions by Marita Mathijsen ("The Future of Textual Editing") contributed to the 1998 anthology Editing the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 45-54—an anthology with a notably careless and unperceptive introduction, which finds an editorial "crisis" in "all three great traditions" (English, French, and German).

"Textual Perspectives in Italy: From Pasquali's Historicism to the Challenge of `Variantistica' (and Beyond)," Text, 11 (1998), 155-188.

"The `New Philology' from an Italian Perspective," Text, 12 (1999), 49-58; this article, translated by Marcello Cherchi, was originally published in Italian in a 1997 German anthology, Alte und neue Philologie, ed. Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft, pp. 35-42.

David R. Whitesell, "Fredson Bowers and the Editing of Spanish Golden Age Drama," Text (see note 12 above), 8 (1995), 67-84; Carol Bingham Kirby, "Editing Spanish Golden Age Dramatic Texts: Past, Present, and Future Models," Text, 8 (1995), 171-184; H. T. M. van Vliet, "Scholarly Editing in the Netherlands," Text, 13 (2000), 103-129; Annemarie Kets-Vree, "Dutch Scholarly Editing: The Historical-Critical Edition in Practice," Text, 13 (2000), 131-149. Cf. van Vliet and Kets-Vree, "Scholarly Editing in the Netherlands," Literary & Linguistic Computing (see note 11 above), 15 (2000), 65-72.

I have discussed the first edition in the 1986 essay in this series (see note 1 above), pp. 39-45 (pp. 147-153 in Textual Criticism since Greg).

Such as the new opening of "Ideal Texts" (p. 75) or the new second and third paragraphs of "Economics and Editorial Goals" (pp. 123-124). One substantial insertion is a good five-page discussion of Hans W. Gabler's and John Kidd's differing approaches to editing Ulysses (pp. 109-114); and the chapters on the use of computers have a high concentration of revisions that take technical developments into account.

I wish his discussion had covered three points more explicitly than it does: (1) although he notes "the tendency to equate versions of the work with documents of the work" (p. 97), he does not comment on the possibility that a document may contain more than one version; (2) his claim that "authors cannot say in texts things that cannot be represented in linguistic or iconic signs on paper" (p. 96) illustrates his neglect of oral texts; and (3) he does not give very clear recognition to collaborative or social intention, in addition to authorial intention, as a possible goal of critical editing.

Whether this is the case of course depends on the relative skill with which the texts have been supplied with cross-references and lists of variants.

It first appeared on the internet, where it is available (in a text dated 6 May 1995, as of this writing) at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html>. Its first printed appearance was in a shortened form in European English Messenger, 4.2 (Autumn 1995), 34-40 (which concentrates on the examples and leaves out the introductory section, the sections entitled "Hyperediting and Hypermedia" and "Coda," and the notes, as well as scattered shorter passages). The full version has been published with modifications (primarily the addition of several paragraphs to the discussion of Example D) in Text, 9 (1996), 11-32 (the text cited here) and in Electronic Text, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (1997), pp. 19-46. (In the title, "HyperText" has a capital middle "T" in the internet and Text appearances but not in the other two.)

As he himself says later, "Enthusiasts for hypertext sometimes make extravagant philosophical claims" p. 28).

McGann persists in distinguishing "poetry" and "expository text" in "Endnote: What Is Text?", in Ma(r)king the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 329-333. In this piece, he quite properly criticizes the limitations in the concept of text that underlies the Text Encoding Initiative, which concentrates on the "narrowly `linguistic' " elements and neglects the "more broadly `semiotic' " ones (p. 331); but the criticism is relevant to the encoding of all texts, not just those that he believes can be segregated as " `poetic' or non-informational forms of textuality" (p. 330).

As an analogue, he cites the study of the physical world, in which "it makes a great difference if the level of the analysis is experiential (direct) or mathematical (abstract)" (p. 12). But it is hard to see what parallelism McGann has in mind, for both the codex and the electronic presentations of textual evidence are empirical (or "experiential") in approach.

One rarely hears the other side: the codex form has its advantages, too, at least for some people. It is not necessarily the case, for example, that turning a few leaves is more difficult or time-consuming than entering a search command or pressing a key to move to a variant text. But there is no doubt that many (if not all) people will find it easier in electronic form to do many (but not all) of the things one wishes to do in the course of careful reading.

In his 1998 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship ("Hideous Progeny, Rough Beasts: Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit," Text, 11 [1998], 1-16), which includes an interesting historical account of his Rossetti Hypermedia Archive, McGann repeats his baseless claim that "The value of computerization for the study of books and texts lies exactly in the fact that with computerized tools we do not bring books to study books"; he adds, "when our tools function at higher levels of abstraction from the materials we are studying, we create conditions for new orders of certainty" (p. 12). Another instance of his hyperbole in this piece: "Editing in paper-based formats, I came to understand, literally creates the set of contradictions that mark the differences between documentary and critical approaches to editing" (p. 7). These differences (which are not "contradictions," reflecting as they do complementary approaches) obviously exist on a conceptual level and cannot be created by one form of implementation. Documentary and critical presentations may often be easier to use in electronic form, but the differences between them obviously remain. Perhaps such misconceptions are related to a more basic one: his naïve belief that "the `hypothesis' represented by an editorial undertaking is very different from the hypothesis of a theoretical or interpretive book or essay" (pp. 7-8)—a strange point to make a few pages after the (correct) assertion that certain landmark editions "are polemical works bearing within themselves complex and far-reaching arguments" (p. 3).

Though they do contain some questionable statements, as when he calls a particular edition "a reader's edition, not a critical edition" (p. 18)—a problematical distinction under any circumstances, but especially so given his earlier comments.

He speaks only of libraries in which the books themselves are shelved according to a subject classification; but his basic point of course remains valid for those libraries where the books are arranged in accession order and where subject access is only through a catalogue.

She quotes him as saying that "the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language" (p. 3). But the work/text distinction that she believes has been undercut is the one more commonly made by textual critics, in which the signification of the two terms is approximately reversed. She allows this switch in usage to distract her from looking into the concepts that the terms refer to in each case.

The essays alluded to in this paragraph are: Renear, "Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality," pp. 107-126; Flanders, "The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text," pp. 127-144; Robinson, "New Directions in Critical Editing," pp. 145-171; Conner, "Lighting out for the Territory: Hypertext, Ideology, and Huckleberry Finn," pp. 67-106; Donaldson, "Digital Archive as Expanded Text: Shakespeare and Electronic Textuality," pp. 173-198; Lamont, "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext," pp. 47-66. (Another article of Flanders's, misleadingly entitled "Trusting the Electronic Edition," is a superficial discussion of the role of images in electronic editions; see Computers and the Humanities, 31 [1997-98], 301-310.)

He quite rightly implies the continuing value of consulting originals, as when he says that "the availability of a digital reproduction does not in any way render the original any less available" (p. 241). I must note by the way that this point is applicable primarily to manuscripts and pre-nineteenth-century printed items; a great many post-1800 printed items have been, and continue to be, destroyed precisely because some librarians believe that reproductions render the space-consuming originals unnecessary. (On this issue, see, among other essays of mine, the ones cited in note 16 above.)

The volume should have ended with Unsworth's thoughtful essay, not with the "Afterword" (pp. 245-248) by A. Walton Litz, who simply repeats glib exaggerations about how "electronic resources have profoundly affected many of our conceptions of the editor's function" (p. 245). (It must be noted that Finneran himself, in his preface, speaks of digital technology producing "a fundamental paradigm shift.") Litz is right to think of "electronic editing as another form of criticism" (p. 246) but wrong to believe the word "electronic" is necessary, since editing has always been a form of criticism. And it is strange that he then insists on the electronic editor's "nonintervention" (p. 248)—the impossibility and undesirability of which are recognized in several of the essays in the volume. (The titles of the essays mentioned in this paragraph are as follows: Hockey, "Creating and Using Electronic Editions," pp. 1-21; Shillingsburg, "Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials," pp. 23-35; Unsworth, "Electronic Scholarship; or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public," pp. 233-243.)

Ross, "The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition," pp. 225-231; Doss, "Traditional Theory and Innovative Practice: The Electronic Editor as Poststructuralist Reader," pp. 213-224.

As when he says that "hypertext allows a reader to escape the linearity imposed by print media" (p. 219).

This point is well taken even if one doubts Doss's notion that "the aesthetic character of the textual editor's job is more apparent in hypertext environments than in print" (p. 217). Another anthology substantially devoted to the computer—but in this case to its role in analyzing texts rather than presenting them—is Studies in Stemmatology (1996; see note 9 above), based on a series of colloquia at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, reflecting "the newly recovered field of stemmatology" (p. xii). The editors of the volume, Pieter van Reenen and Margot van Mulken, assert in their "Prologue" that the use of the computer for stemmatic analysis of difficult traditions has resulted in "heightened awareness of the limitations of the researcher's own capacities and those of the computer." This development, if true, is obviously for the good, as is the idea that the stemma "is no longer seen as an authoritative prescriptive scheme which an editor should blindly apply to his manuscript tradition"—something it should never have been. That the computer may somehow have helped to inject basic critical sense into the field is not, however, a reason to believe that "the implementation of the computer has fundamental theoretical implications" (p. ix). An example of the good sense that follows from regarding the stemma as "guiding and advisory," not "prescriptive" (p. 99), is Peter M. W. Robinson's contribution, "Computer-Assisted Stemmatic Analysis and `Best-Text' Historical Editing" (pp. 71-103). By "best text" he does not mean what that term has historically meant but rather uses it as a synonym for "base text" (or, one might add, "copy-text"), which is subject to emendations through editorial judgment. What he says, therefore, is not news to editors of modern literature, but it is good to have this clear statement of it applied to medieval literature.

See his "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions," Text, 8 (1995), 109-124; and "Electronic Editions and the Needs of Readers," in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, Il (see note 8 above), pp. 149-156. The quotations below are from the first.

A view that Germaine Warkentin has called "the untethered Utopianism of the new age of the computer" (in her review of The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham [1997], in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 36 [1998], 128-130). Ian Small, too, has written of the illusory nature of the freedom that a hypertext archive supposedly offers, since hypertext is structured according to the values of the person(s) who set up the structure; his point is not to suggest that such values should be eliminated but rather to recognize the inevitability of value judgments and to affirm the importance of embracing them—"as editors," he says, "we ought to be as evaluative as possible." See "Postmodernism and the End(s) of Editing," in the 1998 anthology Editing the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 35-43 (quotation from p. 43); and "Identifying Text and Postmodernist Editorial Projects," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 43-56 (which reuses in its last six pages a substantial portion of the earlier article—pp. 37-43—in somewhat revised form).

"The One Text and the Many Texts," pp. 5-14 (quotation from p. 13). In his abstract of the essay, he characterizes a reconstructed text as "the text that best explains all the extant documents." In a similar vein, Jesse D. Hurlbut has stated that "part of the editor's role is to recommend possible directions one may choose to follow" through the mass of linked materials, such guidance of course reflecting "the editor's expertise and experience"; see "Shifting Paradigms and the Development of Hypermedia Editions," Studies in Medievalism (see note 12 above), 9 (1997), 228-238 (quotation from p. 233). (Hurlbut's generally sound discussion has its simplistic moments, however, as in the passage that tries to elaborate how electronic editing leads to "reevaluation of the need to designate a base manuscript" [p. 231], without truly seeing the issues or recognizing that they are independent of whether editions are published in codex or electronic form.)

"Historical Reading and Editorial Practice," in Ma(r)king the Text (see note 10 above), pp. 193-200 (quotations from p. 199).

"In Dreams Begins Responsibility: Novels, Promises, and the Electronic Edition," in Textual Studies and the Common Reader (see note 10 above), pp. 160-179.

Such as calling the search for authorial intention "romantic" (pp. 126, 127) and peaking of "the latent idealism of copy-text editing" (p. 130). The article appears in Pilgri- age for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. igrid King (1999), pp. 115-132 (the text cited here), and also in Problems of Editing (see ote 7 above), pp. 96-112.

Another unfounded complaint is that analytical bibliographers refuse to consider evidence external to the books under investigation. The irresponsible repetition of this criticism is symbolized by the fact that Hugh Amory, in the opening chapter of the first volume of A History of the Book in America (The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Amory and David D. Hall, 2000), refers to "what bibliographers casually dismiss as `external evidence' " (p. 43). Amory knew better, and it is regrettable that he allowed such a major work to be marred by his eagerness to criticize analytical bibliography.

The volume, she believes, not only "tackles textual issues in a new light" but also has a "readability" absent from the work of the New Bibliographers, whose writing she criticizes for being "prosaic and straightforward" and eschewing "extended metaphor or creative play" (p. 13). (Anyone familiar with, for example, Pollard's style will find this a strange assertion.) Even Barbara A. Mowat, in her contribution to the anthology, assumes "a post-New Bibliography world" (p. 144), though the New Bibliography remains crucial for her focus on the documentary texts rather than on the attempt to reconstruct authorial manuscripts ("The Problem of Shakespeare's Text(s)," pp. 131-148—an earlier version of which appeared in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 132 [1996], 26-43). (I should add that the Maguire-Berger anthology, despite its introduction and opening essay, contains more essays of significance than most anthologies, and some of them are commented on below, notably a fine piece by Tom Davis.) Maguire was perhaps hoping to promote the kind of writing that appeared a few years earlier in an essay by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy, " `What's the Matter?' Shakespeare and Textual Theory," Textual Practice, 9 (1995), 93-119: it contains a particularly extravagant passage in which the New Bibliography is said to involve not only the mixture of the "mechanistic language of materialism" and "an efflux of Platonic idealism" (p. 96) but also "a patriarchal sexualization of the text," in which "the manuscript is a version of the female body" and the "printed text interposes an opaque and obstructive `veil' . . . between the male desire and its object" (p. 97). (Later on the same page the New Bibliographers are found participating in a "re-enactment of the Christian myth," since they arranged for the "incarnated text" to be assumed into "the heaven of authorial intention." Later still: "that virtually all-male club the New Bibliographers evidently cherished beneath their respectable tweed jackets a perverse desire to ravish the printed text in order to release the perfect female body enclosed within it" p. 101].)

A more valuable way of critically examining the actual work of the New Bibliographers, and one of more direct usefulness to textual criticism, is offered by the two excellent essays that follow, by Paul Werstine and Michael Warren, which show the lack of foundation for Pollard's and Greg's arguments supporting the idea that certain quarto texts derived from abridgments for provincial use or from memorial reconstruction (Werstine, "Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism," pp. 45-66; Warren, "Greene's Orlando: W. W. Greg Furioso," pp. 67-91). Werstine, indeed, always writes cogently and intelligently on the history of editorial thinking about Shakespeare; for another admirable example, see his "Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing," Text, 13 (2000), 27-53, which focuses on the disagreements among Wilson, McKerrow, and Greg and thus demonstrates "the enormously diverse principles for editing Shakespeare on offer in the early part of this century" (p. 46). (A somewhat less successful effort is his "Post-Theory Problems in Shakespeare Editing," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 103-117: although his point that play manuscripts took many more varied forms than simply "foul papers" and "prompt-book" is unquestionably worth making, his argument is less effective than it might be, owing to what comes across as an eagerness to criticize Greg and his followers, reflected in continual reference to their "grand narrative" and in reductive summaries of their position.)

Despite a number of unfortunate comments such as these in Zimmerman's "Afterword," it is for the most part a remarkable statement of points that are not usually made: see note 110 below. Paul Werstine, another contributor to the forum, certainly knows that analytical bibliography is independent of editing. However, his contribution, "Editing after the End of Editing" (pp. 47-54), is not up to his usual standard, though he is always worth reading. Here he seems to think one can criticize the effort to segregate compositorial and authorial characteristics by saying that it offers "no way to break the hermeneutic circle" (p. 49). There is nothing objectionable about searching printed texts for clues to the characteristics of an author's manuscript, even when the characteristics of such manuscripts are unknown: the process reflects the nature of the world, the condition (in one degree or another) of all research. What would be objectionable would be not to attempt the search at all. Of course, one may evaluate the care with which it is conducted; but if that was what Werstine was doing, there was no need to invoke the "hermeneutic circle."

The shallowness of much of his discussion is epitomized by his statement that "editors must prepare a text, but interpreters and theorists need only articulate an argument" (p. 11). To his credit, however, he also says (rather inconsistently) that "most cultural critics have not become aware that ontological assumptions underlie any attempt to constitute— and therefore to read or theorize—the text of a work" (p. 6). Still another example of a discussion guilty of merging New Bibliography and final authorial intention is Andrew Murphy's " `Came errour here by mysse of man': Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 118-137 (see pp. 131-135), an essay that in many respects is a thoughtful meditation on the "desire for direct individual connection with the author" (p. 133)—though he goes too far in suggesting that intentionalist editors seek a "source of true, irrevocable, unitary meaning" (p. 135).

This essay serves as the introduction to his 1997 anthology, Texts and Textuality (see note 8 above), pp. xi-xxxiv, and is a revised version of his introduction to a special 1994 number of Resources for American Literary Study (see note 11 above), pp. 133-18.

Cohen even makes it appear that one of McGann's contributions is to show "that the physical form containing a linguistic text is also a text" (p. xvi). McGann would not wish to make this claim, worded in this way, for he knows that analytical bibliographers have long shown how one reads physical evidence to extract a narrative. But their narratives deal with printing history, whereas McGann's involve book design. Cohen compounds the problem: "Such a textualizing of what has traditionally been treated as the physical form containing a text renders analytical bibliography an even more interpretive discipline than it has been heretofore." How can it (or anything) be "more interpretive"? What he presumably means is that its scope is enlarged—which would be true if one calls the analysis of readers' responses to book design "analytical bibliography" (an extension I find unobjectionable). But the traditional kind of analytical bibliography still has its role to play, and the implication that intentionalist editors ignored design features is not true—for they (quite properly, given their goal) paid attention to design whenever it seemed to be an authorially intended part of a work. (The ubiquity of this inaccurate notion is suggested by Karen Bjelland's offhand and nonsensical remark that "even the bibliographical community has been slow to explore the meaning of its own codes given the continuing influence of Greg"; see "The Editor as Theologian, Historian, and Archaeologist: Shifting Paradigms within Editorial Theory and Their Sociocultural Ramifications," Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 11 [2000], 1-43 [quotation from p. 20].)

I should mention that an essay of mine, "The Varieties of Scholarly Editing," appears in this volume (pp. 9-32). Because my piece is introductory, it is unlike all the other essays, which focus on specific fields; and those other essays are what make the volume valuable. (The fields covered, and the scholars responsible for the coverage, are mentioned in note 35 above.)

A particularly detailed examination of gender in editing occurs in a different anthology, Textual Formations and Reformations (see note 10 above), where Valerie Wayne discusses, with effective examples, "the ways in which male compositors and editors have created texts that debase and efface women and members of other marginalized groups" ("The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission," pp. 179-210 [quotation from p. 179]).

He concludes (in a fashion typical of his writing) that "if a combination of the [Supreme Court's] Feist decision [on copyright], personalist criticism, local knowledge, and the posthermeneutic dispensation can make us textually dangerous again, then perhaps the loss of philological face will have been worth it." To end with a comment about "losing face" trivializes the whole discussion. (For a perceptive and witty review of this anthology, see T. H. Howard-Hill's in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 92 [1998], 351357.)

If beginning students only knew, there are passages not worth their time, since the matters treated in them are handled more clearly and authoritatively elsewhere. A particularly vulnerable area is analytical bibliography: Figure 18, for instance, is useless and possibly misleading, and Figures 24 and 27 could certainly be improved as teaching devices (for they do not make clear that two inner and two outer formes are involved in each case); and the account of setting by formes for a folio in sixes (p. 285) is imprecise and would, I believe, puzzle a beginner. These instances, and others like them, are minor blemishes, to be sure, in relation to the whole work; yet in a textbook such blemishes are not trivial. (See also the third footnote in my 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above].)

I have commented on some of the previously published ones in two earlier essays in this series (see note 1 above): my 1991 essay, pp. 128-130 (commenting on the pieces now prefaced by Interweaves 4-7; and my 1996 essay, p. 26 (Interweave 12), p. 30 (Interweave 17), and p. 48 (Interweave 9).

This admirable statement is unfortunately weakened by the phrase "both editorial and critical," which suggests that editorial decisions are not critical.

Greetham here chooses the fashionable verb "empowered" despite its inappropriateness for the point he is making; a less assertive expression (such as "reflective of") would convey the meaning better.

Bennett's essay (with the subtitle "The Editor And?/Or? the Text") appears in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (1993), pp. 67-96 (quotation from p. 90).

Greetham's discussion is rendered particularly unclear by his mixing of a separate point into the "paradox." Bennett says, in the passage already quoted from, "To isolate the editing of works of and by females . . . would defeat the very purpose that inspired `Classical' feminism itself." Greetham points out, correctly, that "the editing of works of and by females" is not the only form that feminist editing might take; and he suggests that if Bennett had tried to relate editing to a different kind of feminism, she might not have had the same doubts about feminist editorial theory and therefore might not have found herself in an "awkward position." It is of course legitimate to raise the question of whether her doubts are well founded; but the answer to that question has nothing whatever to do with the claim that her doubts (however they were formed) produce a paradox or place her "into a corner" (p. 440).

Many other problematical points could be cited, such as the repeated use of "the text that never was" (as on p. 367) to refer to the product of critical editing, or the related claim that "the result of eclecticism . . . is manifestly unhistorical" (p. 53)—with no new arguments offered to justify the continual assertion of these questionable ideas. There is even the claim that "The appeal of Reagan and Bush on the one hand and textual idealism on the other was both Edenic and teleological" (p. 372). There are also outright errors, such as saying that "New Bibliography" is a term "used to designate the technical research of analytical and descriptive bibliography" (p. 87).

This phraseology is itself off the mark, because no one has been arguing about the comprehensiveness of the intentionalist or the social approaches within themselves; the relevant point is whether the two fit together to form a more comprehensive overview. If a perceived "intentionalist" scholar argues that the two are indeed complementary, that does not make the intentionalist approach itself more comprehensive.

In two earlier essays in this series (see note 1 above), I have commented on four of the previously published chapters: in my 1991 essay, p. 131 (on the piece that is now his fifth chapter), and in my 1996 essay, pp. 37-41 (on the pieces that are now his second, third, and seventh chapters).

A related point: Shillingsburg thinks that an author's desire not to have a specific intention falls in a different category from authorial intention. For example, after saying that script-act theory is likely to focus on the use of language "to convey meaning," he states that the theory must also cover "script acts for which any response is equally appropriate, for which there was no attempt to imbue the language with intention to be understood or misunderstood" (p. 10). But such a situation is simply another example of authorial intention: the reader's response is defined in terms of what the author had in mind. Two pages later, he contrasts communicative acts with texts that "may never have had specific communicative force in their generation" and with those instances where readers choose not to care about authorial intention; but only the latter in fact describes a situation in which communication is not involved.

Shillingsburg admits, "I'm overstating my case." I would have preferred to read what he would have said if he were not overstating his case.

He is certainly not opposed to critical (emended) texts, for he believes an electronic edition should include "an archive of edited texts, or at least one edited text, produced to reflect the work of a historian or of several," along with images and searchable texts of "historical documents," as well as historical, critical, and textual commentary (p. 24). Are we to believe that the presence of documentary texts in full will counteract readers' apathy about textual matters and energize them into studying textual variants?

This distinction is not quite the same as Shillingsburg's between a "social contract" (in which an author willingly yields some authority to others) and a "production contract" (in which copy-editors or printers, for example, make alterations in texts). When he says that the social contract "should be binding on both the original printer and the modern editor" but that the production contract "has no more standing with a modern editor than the interference of any unauthorized third party" (p. 163), he leaves out the possibility of studying the texts that readers had available to them and were influenced by. (He also confuses the issue by including inadvertent as well as intended changes in the production contract. It seems strange not to include printers' and publishers' intended changes within the social contract, as part of what is entailed by the social process of bringing texts to readers. An interest in publishers' intended texts is not the same as an interest in the texts that were actually published.)

All of this chapter (pp. 207-225), except the fourteen paragraphs from the top of page 215 to the bottom of page 218, originally appeared under the title "Editions Half Perceived, Half Created" in Studies in the Literary Imagination (see note 11 above), 29 (1996), 75-88. The added material was in part restated and revised from "Editing Thackeray: A History," Studies in the Novel (see note 11 above), 27 (1995), 363-374.

As when he claims that the consensus view among American editors of the 1960s and 1970s held "that best and most reliable were synonymous with the author's final intentions" (p. 211), or when he asserts (not for the first time) that "multiple texts in printed form cannot avoid hierarchic presentation" (p. 211).

Negotiating Conflicting Aims in Scholarly Editing: The Problem of Editorial Intentions," in Problems of Editing (see note 7 above), pp. 1-8.

"Social Discourse or Authorial Agency: Bridging the Divide between Editing and Theory," in The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts (1998), pp. 97116. I have conflated the two parts of Eggert's title because the "divide" is not really between editing and theory (since for each theory there are kinds of editions to carry out its principles) but—in the minds of some people—between two theoretical approaches (since some people feel that accepting one requires rejecting the other).

Another side-benefit is an interesting discussion of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules—which, however, does not strike me as relevant to the topic at hand. The Rules do, of course, serve as an example of the continuing usefulness of the concept of individual authority for verbal works; but that example has nothing to do with what attitude textual theorists might reasonably hold toward the concept.

"Editing the Academy Editions of Australian Literature: Historical Version and Authorial Agency," in The Humanities and a Creative Nation: Jubilee Essays, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder (1995), pp. 69-88; reprinted (slightly revised) as "General-Editing and Theory: Historical Version and Authorial Agency" in Problems of Editing (see note 7 above), pp. 4258 (the text cited here). In this essay, he quotes from his essay-review of Jack Stillinger's Multiple Authority and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), "Making Sense of Multiple Authorship," Text, 8 (1995), 305-323, which ends with the same point as these other essays: with his text/document distinction, he believes, "the textual dimension of the work is returned to the documentary level in the act of physical inscription, only to re-emerge again, differently, whenever the document is read." Another comment in this review, a few sentences earlier, is that "the textual apparatus in critical editions might come to be seen as more important than the reading text"; this remark is not so startling as Eggert believes and indeed is very close to comments made by Fredson Bowers, Jo Ann Boydston, and other intentionalist editors. (See, among other places, my 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above], p. 52.) He is wrong to claim that a critical text is "cut free of its historical moorings" (p. 322), but he is to be applauded for expressing the hope that "the critically edited text would be understood not so much as capturing the literary work in an essential form as participating in it" (p. 312).

He believes, surprisingly, that it is at odds with the traditional position, which— he thinks—posits a stable text of the work. But he hardly supports this idea by asserting, "The doctrine of final authorial intention has offered an achievable way of approximating the ideal text of a work, of keeping it singular" (p. 55). It was usually kept singular by the demands of the codex form, and the word "final" was an indication that multiple intentions were recognized (as the apparatus made explicit). Whereas Eggert says that editors of the past wanted to believe in the stability of texts of works, it would be more accurate to say that it was their critics who wanted to believe that this was their position. Other related problems appear in the essay: when, for instance, he discusses (pp. 53-55) the fact that authors' original intentions (in their minds) are unlikely to be transferred precisely to writing and that what does get written affects what else is written, he asks, "where does this leave editing which appeals to a criterion of authorial intention?" Behind the question would seem to be the assumption that intentionalist editors seek a single "original" intention rather than the intention(s) manifested in acts of writing. (Cf. my comments in the 1996 essay in this series [see note 1 above], pp. 58-59.) Lapses of this kind, however, do not affect the value of the main line of his discussion.

In developing his ideas for a 1997 conference paper, "The Work Unravelled" (published in Text, 11 [1998], 41-60), he produced a less successful effort to offer "a different conceptualisation of the literary work" (p. 43). A basic flaw is evident near the beginning when he surprisingly asserts that intended texts cannot be historical because people's minds cannot generally retain long texts in their entirety. But those who believe that intended texts are historical events have never, so far as I am aware, claimed that the quantity of text that can be held in the mind has any relevance whatever to the matter. Authors' or publishers' intentions, as traditionally talked about, are the intentions involved at each moment; those intentions reflect particular concepts, not the simultaneous awareness of every word and mark of punctuation previously selected. That texts are built up in this way on a physical surface does not in any sense invalidate the idea that the physical text may not faithfully represent the intended text and that the intended text is as historical as the documentary one. Eggert's essay proceeds dutifully to sketch the development of philosophical attitudes toward the subject/object problem and then envisages (with, he believes, Theodor Adorno's help) the "work" as something that "unravels, in every moment of its being, into a relationship between its documentary and its textual dimensions" (p. 58). As with the earlier essay discussed above, his use of "textual" to signify "referring to meaning" detracts from the clarity of this conception; but if one makes allowance for this problem, his statement then makes sense but is not in any way revolutionary, for the postulated "relationship" is what has always underlain textual criticism and all kinds of editing. That he uses the negative image of unraveling for this process is, however, strange (and unfortunate); a constructive metaphor of knitting or weaving would be more apt. (On the Academy Editions, see his "Editing a Nation's Literature: The Academy Editions of Australian Literature Project," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 20 [1996], 146-153.)

In a later essay, "Where Are We Now with Authorship and the Work?" (see note 32 above), he again affirms the importance of the concept of authorship ("authorship has continued to answer to needs and to ways of knowing" [p. 99]) but recognizes that "agency" (which encompasses more than authorship) is "the most focused form of explanation we have in pointing to responsibility for the physical-inscriptional act of text" (p. 102). And he again sets forth positions that are in fact well established, but one cannot complain about such clear restatements of the obvious as the following: "if editors pursue it [final authorial intention] they need to be aware of their own participation in the standard and be aware that their definition of a textual source of authority is inevitably influenced by their own life and times" (p. 101); "the editor asks as the basic question not, What was the intended meaning? but, rather, What was the intended physical inscription?" (p. 102). The first is a given for all discourse; the second is how intention has regularly been defined by intentionalist editors.

In "The Dangers of Editing, or, the Death of the Editor," in The Editorial Gaze (see note 8 above), pp. 51-66. Still another writer who wishes "to address the opponents of critical editions" is Nathan Houser, who—as an editor of the Charles Sanders Peirce Edition—offers "a Peircean semiotics of critical editing" and makes a case "for the reality of authorial texts, which, as types, can guide the editing process" (documents are "the signs of the work," and "a work (as a type) stands as a dynamic object for the textual editor"); see "The Semiotics of Critical Editing: Is There a Future for Critical Editions?", in Semiotics around the World, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (1997), pp. 1073-1076.

Among other scattered problems in his essay is his handling of what readers "require." I certainly agree that they need "mediated texts" (by which he means critical texts, though earlier on the same page [p. 61] he had said, with good reason, "A facsimile text is itself mediated"). But he calls this fact about what readers require a "painful truth," since apparently for him the reason for giving readers critical texts is simply that they desire "a received or acceptable text" and do not "want or need" to read the apparatus. The preparation of critical texts, however, has a higher aim than catering to readers' unenlightened preferences. It is not at odds with the effort to encourage readers to see the relevance of textual history to their own reading; indeed, critical texts with apparatus are—and should be publicized as—specialists' guides into, not away from, the complexities of textual history.

The first scholarly edition, I believe, to have explicitly followed my suggestion is the volume devoted to This Side of Paradise (1995, edited by James L. W. West III) in the Cambridge edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald. See also two reviews by Richard Bucci: "Serving Fitzgerald's Intentions without a Copy-Text," Text, 14 (2002), 324-333 (a review of Trimalchio, 2000); and his review of Robert Coltrane's 1998 edition of Twelve Men in the Pennsylvania Dreiser edition, Text, 14 (2002), 372-380. Robert H. Hirst plans to follow this approach in future volumes of the "Works of Mark Twain" series (University of California Press).

A phrase he used as the title of an article in Common Knowledge, 8 (2002), 516525.

But not very often, except by Shillingsburg and me. One of the few other instances is Susan Zimmerman's "Afterword" to a collection of essays in the 1996 volume of Shakespeare Studies (see note 78 above and the passage to which it is attached). Zimmerman recognizes that "there is a danger in grounding a new editorial practice in a reaction to the insufficiencies of an earlier theory" (p. 72). In commenting on authorial intention, she again is more perceptive than the usual critics: "we should not propose that psychic processes themselves are suspect as an area of historical inquiry, or that such processes are not material" (p. 73). Her conclusion is worth remembering: "perhaps the most important question to bear in mind is not how accurately we represent the past, but how deliberately we formulate the theoretical premises by which we dare to investigate it" (p. 74).

Ray's essay (written for a 1972 conference) was first printed in Illinois Libraries, 55 (1973), 235-241, and then included in the conference proceedings, Reading in a Changing World, ed. Foster E. Mohrhardt (1976), pp. 20-30; it was reprinted in Books as a Way of Life: Essays by Gordon N. Ray, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (1988), pp. 351-364. The quotation (from p. 362) I find so admirable that I have quoted it (or parts of it), in conversation and in print, on many occasions. One of the published instances is "Books, Canons, and the Nature of Dispute," Common Knowledge, 1 (1992), 78-91, reprinted in my Literature and Artifacts (1998), pp. 275-290; in that essay I take up at greater length some of the issues I am commenting on here. And in the third footnote I make this comment: "Because I have repeatedly . . . found fault with those who have opposed an intentionalist approach, it has sometimes been asserted that I am a `defender' of that approach. . . . It would be more accurate, I think, to say that I have criticized the arguments of many of those who have attacked the study of intention. But the pervasiveness of partisan thinking makes it difficult for some people to see dissent in any terms other than a defense of one line and hostility to another. I know of no grounds for being hostile to social textual criticism; but the arguments of many of its advocates are internally unsound, and therefore self-defeating."

"The Text of Dryden's Poetry," Huntington Library Quarterly, 63 (2000 [but published later]), 227-244.

In a slight 1996 piece he had said that editing is not only "a hot topic" but "arguably the hot topic"; see "The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today," Shakespeare Studies (see note 12 above), 24 (1996), 30-37 (reprinted, with revisions and additions, in his Shakespeare after Theory [1999], pp. 59-70). This piece, now superseded by his Shakespeare and the Book, need not detain one.

David L. Vander Meulen, in "The Editorial Principles of Martinus Scriblerus" (see note 17 above), points out that Pope's fictional editor of The Dunciad Variorum (1729) aims through emendation to reconstruct an authorially intended text, not merely a particular documentary text; Vander Meulen, noting that this goal has in recent years been called "Romantic," then observes, "Scriblerus, in common with other eighteenth-century editors, applies those `Romantic' principles to vernacular literature in the century before they were supposedly devised" (p. 175).

I have discussed how such a critical text might be produced in the case of Melville, in "The Text of Melville in the Twenty-First Century," in Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (1997), pp. 332-345 (especially pp. 337-338).

Contrary to what one might have expected from reading the introduction, Kastan believes that authorial intentions "matter" and are "to some degree . . . recoverable," though in the same passage he irrelevantly says that "in Shakespeare's case they are unavailable" (p. 121)—a pointless idea (though commonly expressed), for the "availability" of anyone's intention is a relative matter and one that does not affect the desirability of attempting to recover it.

This part of his sentence stands on its own and should not be introduced by the phrases he places at the beginning: "In the absence of an authentic original, indeed in the absence of a general agreement about what an authentic original might be, . . . ." Even if there were an "authentic original," there would still be textual issues that could be resolved more than one way; and people, quite rightly, would continually feel the necessity to produce new editions.

In Textual Formations and Reformations (see note 10 above), pp. 95-111. At this point it is worth recalling Kelvin Everest's point about editing being "at the heart of a living contemporary literary culture" (see the passage above to which note 72 is attached) and Joseph Grigely's view that culture "depends on remaking texts in order to exist" (cited at the end of part I above). Another relevant comment is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's: "every editor . . . adopts roles that are close to those of singers, poets, or authors, and . . . without taking this step, the role of the editor does not even begin to exist"; see his "Play Your Roles Tactfully! About the Pragmatics of Text-Editing, the Desire for Identification, and the Resistance to Theory," in Editing Texts, Texte edieren (see note 9 above), pp. 237-250 (quotation from p. 238). Still another fine essay that expresses the same general point of view is Marcus Walsh's "Hypotheses, Evidence, Editing, and Explication," Yearbook of English Studies (see note 11 above), 29 (1999), 24-42, which defends the interpretive basis of textual criticism: "Interpreters and editors are in the business . . . of making judgements in the light of available evidence" (p. 28). The resulting "probabilistic knowledge" is "valid knowledge": "Between the Scylla of unattainable fixity and certainty, and the Charybdis of relativism and scepticism, lies the world in which human beings live, in which we can understand each other" (p. 42).